Posts by Hans Vredevoort

If you receive the Microsoft MVP award, this is only valid for a single year. Therefore, MVP’s all over the world eagerly watch their mailbox on renewal day, on the first day of each quarter. If for some reason Microsoft decides that your participation or worth for the community within your field of expertise is not up to Microsoft standards, your status as an MVP ends. This immediately cuts your line with the product teams as well as your fellow MVPs. For this reason, Microsoft announced the MVP Reconnect program. One day, when I retire or perhaps sooner, I can fall back on this sympathetic program.

What is MVP Reconnect?

MVP Reconnect is Microsoft’s way of keeping former MVPs in touch with Microsoft and each other.

The idea behind the program can be best described with an analogy from another industry; The Oscars are one of the most well recognized and prestigious awards in the film industry. From the moment someone wins their first Oscar, they become part of a very special community – that of Academy Award Winners – and they belong to this community forever, even if they don’t win an award every year. The same is true for MVPs: once an MVP, always part of the MVP community!

Why is this program being launched?

Over the years, Microsoft has received feedback from former MVPs that they were looking for ways to stay in touch with the program and with their peers. This program is an extension of Microsoft’s commitment to the MVP program and another way to recognize the expertise and engagement that folks contribute to technical communities.

Why should I join?

MVP Reconnect allows members to stay connected to other community leaders and Microsoft. If your contributions to the technical community slow down temporarily, staying connected means that you maintain a good position for future recognition as an MVP. If you have a long history with the MVP program, you’ll be able to share your experiences and coach others to take full advantage of all the opportunities that the MVP award can provide.

Benefits include networking opportunities, recognition, and engagement offerings like invitations to community events.

Who is eligible for the program? What are the requirements for membership?

All former MVPs with a minimum award period of one year who ended their tenure “in good standing” are eligible to join. “Good standing” means that an MVP must not have been retired due to an NDA or Code of Conduct violation. There are no limitations based on technical expertise or award category!

Where can I find more information about the program?

More information is available on the MVP Reconnect website at: https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/reconnect-whatis.

How can I join?

In the future, MVPs who reach the end of their award tenure will be invited automatically.

Former MVPs can request to join by filling out the form at https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/reconnect-requestform. After validating the request, Microsoft will send an official email invitation.

Please note that the validation process is made easier by providing more information on the form. Specifically, supplying your MVP ID and primary email used as an MVP will help expedite the process.

As you probably know Azure Stack is currently in TP2 and performance of the portal is noticeably better than TP1. If the portal is sluggish for some reason, there is a way to check the portal load time of the different blades.

To investigate this, you can use the following key combination: CTRL-ALT-D.

Pressing CTRL-ALT-D again will remove the portal load information.

While checking for other key combinations, I also found CTRL-ALT-A which gives you a list of versions of various Azure Stack components.

I have updated the Hyper-V and Cluster Hotfix/Update XML files which accompany the HyperV2012RUpdatesCheck.ps1 file.

The XML files include all hotfixes and updates up to October 2016. Please be aware that many of the individual updates are also included in the monthly update rollups for Windows Server 2012 R2. When I tried to install a couple of updates on one of my clusters, many of the earlier updates were not applicable. Either the conditions for the update fails or the update has already been consolidated in a more recent monthly update.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to verify in which rollup a particular hotfix/update is included. Nevertheless, this script provides you a quick check which hotfixes and/or updates (may) be missing. I have updated the script to reflect this.

You can find the script and XML files on this OneDrive location:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AglTCjVGM7qW2I93OGUE2_xYfWomdQ

I just read a tweet by @PatrickLownds saying that the Service Pack for ProLiant 2016.10.0 is now available. This means Windows Server 2016 is now officially supported. I have been able to try out this version for some time now and have not run into any major problems (yet). Please write a comment if you run into anything significant.

This SSP is the last one that supports the ProLiant G6 series, but you can forget about support for Windows Server 2016.

Since a few years, these SSP’s can only be downloaded if you have an active warranty or HP support agreement. I can’t say I’m happy with this change and hopefully one day HPE comes back on this decision.

Microsoft published a guide to compare specific features of Windows Server versions to understand the differences between the version you are running today and the latest version available from Microsoft: Windows Server 2016.

Today I talked to an HPE representative and asked when the Service Pack for ProLiant (SSP) with support for Windows Server 2016 was expected to be released. Of course now Windows Server 2016 became GA this week, it is crucial that the hardware is updated with supported firmware and drivers. In my previous blog about the proper BusType for Storage Spaces Direct configurations, this was a vital piece to make things work properly.

HPE confirmed that the October 2016 SPP release target is next week (starting October 17, 2016).

As soon as Windows Server 2016 became generally available (GA), I reinstalled one of the HPE Apollo servers (ProLiant XL170r Gen9) available in our lab, to try out Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) with the latest bits, starting with 1 node and ready to add additional nodes to the cluster. I anticipated a quick installation as Microsoft’s storage team had sworn at Ignite, setting up S2D could be done within 15 minutes.

Preparations

Beforehand, I had already prepared the HPE Smart Array P440 controller to work in HBA Mode (aka Pass-Through Mode). In HBA mode, all physical drives are directly available to the operating system and hardware RAID is disabled, which is a requirement for S2D. This can be configured in the HPE Smart Storage Administrator.

After all, Software Defined Storage (SDS) means that all hardware intelligence should be disabled to let Windows Server 2016 create a Storage Pool out of a number of physical disks (HDD, SSD, NVMe). In this configuration there are 4 x 1.2 TB SAS HDD and 2 x 480 GB SATA SSDs. One disk was used for the OS, so five disks left for Storage Spaces Direct.

Before building the S2D cluster, I checked if the disks were “poolable” by looking at the CanPool value which should be True.

To my big surprise, this second command failed with “no disks with supported bus types found to be used for S2D”. This normally happens when you try to build an S2D cluster with virtual machines, but clearly some types of storage controllers have this problem as well.

Since the Azure Stack Architecture blog became rather long, this blog will cover the second part. You can find part one here.

Initial Azure Stack VM sizes

In Azure Stack TP2 there are only a handful VM sizes, but at GA a lot more VM sizes will be supported, although not all VM sizes can be accommodated yet because they require specific hardware configuration.

Azure Stack Compute Requirements

The minimum Azure Stack configuration requires at least four compute nodes. These servers are hyper-converged meaning they combine the Hyper-V and Storage roles of Windows Server 2016. A compute node consists of a dual socket processor with a minimum of 8 cores per socket. With multi-threading enabled this will offer 32 logical processors. A server should have a minimum of 256GB of memory and each server in a hyper-converged cluster should be identical in terms of cpu, storage and network.

Software Defined Network Capabilities Windows Server 2016

Azure Stack greatly benefits from a large number of software defined networking capabilities in Windows Server 2016:

Hall C1 can take 2,000 people and every one of them was present for Spencer Shepler’s Dive into Microsoft Azure Stack Architecture session.

Azure Stack Integrated Systems

First picture Spencer showed was of the three Azure Stack integrated systems by HPE, Dell EMC and Lenovo. A must see on the booth of Ignite 2016.

Timelines

A quick look at the timelines schedule shows that Azure Stack TP2 is now available for a 1-node proof of concept. The multi-node will remain private previews for a limited audience and both the 1-node and multi-node are expected to arrive mid calendar year 2017.

Azure Stack: What is it?

At high level, we are bringing the Azure services into your datacenter on your hardware. We’re trying to provide consistency so you can take your workloads, deploy them in Azure or deploy them onprem to Azure Stack. You can move them back and forth for dev/test for regulatory reasons. There is a variety of reasons why you want the full ecosystem in place for Azure Stack. Read More »

My first session on day 3 of Ignite was Vijay Tewari, Group Product Manager of Azure Stack. An excellent overview was given on how to operate and manage an Azure Stack environment, showing how this works at a much smaller scale than public Azure. Clusters in Azure are not based on Failover Clustering but are close to 1000 nodes in size. So management and operations at the much smaller scale of Azure Stack requires some adaptation.

Cloud Operating Model

In Azure, Microsoft is the cloud provider, offering services to tenants and has a large number of engineers to operate that cloud. In Azure Stack this is exactly the opposite because the service provider/enterprise is the cloud provider, and is responsible for the infrastructure. The customers of Azure Stack are your tenants who consume the services that you are offering.

Key design decisions

Microsoft looked at System Center, as well as the tools that are currently used in Azure. Microsoft decided that the tools in Azure were preferred because that is how MS operates their cloud. It would have been difficult to mold System Center to manage Azure Stack. Nevertheless, Microsoft has taken learnings from both sides, Azure and System Center.

Hyper-converged or Converged?

Microsoft gained a lot of insight in industry trends and with Windows Server 2016 they built great technology which follows along those trends. Microsoft decided to choose hyper-converged with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) over converged with SOFS for Azure Stack. Combining storage and hypervisor is now supported in Windows Server 2016. Read More »